Mr. BadGuy,
Very entertaining read. It was a great way to spend my Saturday at work without work to do. Double awesome to get paid to read it. :-D . I especially like your style in the narriation. The way you keep it simple but still give us enough info to picture it.

yeah...we will be in that location until after the summer.
in the meantime some idiot thought it would be a sweet idea to place a speedball, supported on a CONCRETE block..
Ever tried rolling while worrying about gutting your own head open?
i have...

Mr Bad guy should come and try it out.
He could easily fill 2 threads about that location.

I wandered throughout the yellowpages in a semi-conscious haze, flipping past the millions of Kid Fit/Tae Kwon Do/Boxercise classes, past the places I've already been, and coming up with nothing. I'd frequented Google Maps so many times I could name the first 25 results by heart. I had to change something, as my current pattern would lead to more time wasted and skill lost.

I considered every avenue available; the boxing schools were down town, the kickboxing schools were in different towns, and I'd just about rolled in just about every jiu jitsu place. There were things left, but they were options I'd prefer not to pursue.

Jeet Kune Do was thirty minutes away, and the website left an ominous impression. I'd seen JKD that ranged from "MMA but we like Bruce Lee" to "total bull crap", and I didn't feel like taking any chances.

There was also a RBSD school fifteen minutes from where I work, but their website tipped me off on three things: 1) A morbidly obese instructor 2) Lots of talking, little action and 3) No sparring.

I laterally drifted from the JKD to MMA. Granted, I could end up in another Slip 'n' Slide Waterworld aqua adventure, but it was better than my current options. After a brief search, I found a new class within 5 minutes of my house. It was only 45 minutes long, which was a drag. However I've seen plenty of classes go over the alotted time period with extra sparring, so this was not my primary concern.

I discovered this through google, called the number, and set up my free class. It was taught through the Bushiban organization; the instructor I spoke to claimed it combined Karate, Kung Fu, and Bando, which was Burmese martial arts. I did some light research into Bando, and immediately discovered millions of Muay Thai v. Bando showdowns. Obviously if it battled with Muay Thai, it had to have some truth to it. Even if it didn't, I wasn't there for the bushiban, I was there for the MMA class.

I showed up thirty minutes early to collect some intel on the bushiban themselves. Luckily the Advanced class immediately preceded the MMA class, so I would see the cream of the crop. If they weren't so horrible, maybe I could hop on that too.

Before I even open the door I'm filled with disgust. A 3 sizes too big 13 year old harry potter walks around, black belted. He's giving instructions to two girls, about his age, also black belted. They're all holding katana's, and doing what I recognized from my kung fu days as chinese broadsword movements. In fact, that was the compulsory kid's wushu broadsword form. With katanas. Fuckers.

It's one thing to have black belt kids. It's another thing to give them swords. But it's another thing entirely to fucking mix japanese weapons with chinese wushu forms. That's too much. The other black belts are performing empty hand kata, one legged stances and spinning jump kicks and all the other crap one usually expects. But that wasn't the worst part.

The worst part was how well they were doing. They had roughly 20 or so black belts, and their school took up four slots in the strip mall. The parking lot was filled with tiny white clothed bushibaners waddling towards their dojo, and more showed up every minute. Each of the 20 black belts began teaching at least five to ten lesser belts, until it was a small army of underage martial art pretenders. It was so stereotypical it hurt.

And it did hurt. How tired I've grown of seeing these things, of dealing with these things, of being tricked into these things. Their commercial success was almost criminal. Drug dealers don't have this kind of a client base.

The head instructor walks over to greet me. He's probably 24. One of those XTREME SPORTS! types, he talks about how he skateboards and safety and all this other crap, but it's bouncing off me. I sign the little waiver, and we walk to the OTHER building, where the MMA class will be.

I've already turned against them; there's nothing they could do to sway me. I enter not as a humble student prepared to learn, but as a hungry wolf, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting sheep doing butterfly kicks.

Their shephard led me to a room that had puzzle mats and no scrolls with japanese characters on the wall. Just a plain jane room. He asks me about my prior experience, and I give him a bullet pointed rundown. I end without the BJJ, and he auspiciously comments "Our MMA is more focused on the striking aspect than the grappling." Whether this is good or bad, I cannot say.

I decide to not pull any punches. "So, quick question, is there sparring?" He seems a little flustered by how forward I am. "Well, uh, yea."

"At what kind of contact level do you guys go?"

"Oh, you know. It depends."

He's being delightfully vague. Normally I would mentally write the rest of the night off, smile and handshake my way through the class, and never come back. But I just couldn't. Perhaps I was frustrated that one of my very few leads had come up crap, but something in me was perturbed about this whole situation. I press on him further.

"On what?"

"Oh well. Some times we spar really light, you know. Working technique and control, not hurting ourselves."

"Ah, I gotcha. But, you do go medium to somewhat full occassionally, right?"

"Um, well. That depends, you know?"

No, I'm afraid I don't.

"I'm really new here, so excuse my questions, but what does that depend on?"

"Well, its a person by person basis. Some people don't WANT to spar hard."

"So, if I was the only one who wanted to spar hard, what would happen?"

"Oh, well, um, something would work out. Hey, if you wanna go ahead and get stretched, I'll be right back."

He leads the other class through a finishing bowing ceremony. Another student arrives. He's a year or two younger than me, and looks malnourished. He greets me, and we exchange pleasantries. I say I'm here to try out the MMA class, to which he replies "Cool." We continue talking, and it turns out he's been training here for a large number of years. He got his black belt four years ago; he's almost worshipping the head instructor in his praise. He heaps it on and on, talking about all the various misadventures they've had, and the one time they had to beat a bunch of guys up, and various other things that I've learned to tune out. If the other guy was the shephard, this guy was his dog.

The instructor comes back in, and goes through a normal warm up. Nothing crazy, a few push ups here, a few stretches there, standard fare.

The first technique is the round house kick. We kick with the balls of our feet, he says. In a snapping motion. He pulls out a kicking pad I haven't seen since my Kuk Sool Won days of yore; the foam paddle. We do our kicks, and of course, mine is wrong.

Since the throwdown, and David Koresh Jr.'s advice, I had done some rudimentary stand up with my older BJJ school before it went under. I didn't have a picture perfect kick, hell, I don't even know if it was a GOOD kick. But I did know that these were wrong kicks.

I finish through that technique, but I'm waiting. Very soon he will slip up in a big way, and I will be there. Jaws open.

My patience pays off when he goes over a mount escape.

"This is a very bad place for the guy on bottom to be. The guy on top can punch me, and do all other sorts of stuff. So here's how we get out of this."

His escape was reaching both hands up, grabbing behind the guys head, pulling it down, and then somehow rolling it over.

My chance was here. The gods of fate align it such that myself and the doting skeleton man from earlier are paired together. I ask him to show it to me first. He tips off that he's really good at this particular basic move. It's almost too good.

As he reaches up, I call the teacher over for a question.

"Uhm, what would keep me, the guy on top, from armbarring him?"

"What do you mean?" He asks.

I do the textbook hands on chest spin around armbar.

"Well, two things" the instructor says.

"Obviously we aren't going to be going that slow in real time" He says with a chuckle. Oh, how silly I was!

"and secondly, right when you were laying back, he could just stand up, pull out of that hold, and then you'd be in REAL trouble."

The class laughs. I don't.

"I'm not really sure about that though."

"Well, here, do what you did again. [Dog], roll over."

He grabs up to roll me over and I armbar him immediately. I tighten my legs and pinch them in. He isn't going anywhere.

I'm almost shaking with glee. Every bad thing that has ever happened has been worth it for this moment.

The instructor shoots his arms up to try and grab my head again, but I just spin around and armbar, again.

There is no quippy remark. There is no laughing any more.

"Wow, you're really good at that."

You don't get off that easy, asshole.

"But, do you feel like you can stand up?" I ask in the most innocent way possible.

He struggles. God does he struggle. But he doesn't understand this position, much less how to get out of it. He then has the audacity to ask me, "Well, that's good and all, but what can you do from here? You can't hit me that hard, or do anything, really."

I grab his wrist and start to lay back. "Well, it's an armbar...I'd just do this." I don't extend all the way, or even part of the way, because I know he doesn't know what tapping is. But he knows it hurts. He knows that.

"Ooh, okay."

One of the 12 year old girls in the class asks, "How does that hurt?"

He doesn't answer. He looks up at the clock and says it's time to go. We do a bowing ritual and finish up.

With a feeling of contentment, I walk out. I start to feel guilt creeping in, asking if I was an asshole, but all it takes is a glance at their "student creed" on the wall to reaffirm my feelings.

The Dog kid's mom is parked next to me in the parking lot. He runs up and asks me a question. "Hey dude, where did you learn that stuff?"

"That was grappling. Real MMA."

"Where do I go for that?"

I was a little shocked. Sure, he changed sides quickly, but I guess even a dog can realize it has more in common with the wolf than with the shephard.

I give him the names of some BJJ schools in the area, and we go our separate ways.